"changing
the prevailing scientific culture to a more management-orentated and
businesslike culture .... presents a challenge that, in our opinion
has been underestimated in terms of the time and effort it will
require"

Report of the Canadian Auditor General to the House of
Commons October 1994 Chap. 11

Doctor
Dave Unmanaged

or

Ulysses
Returns

Welcome to my web
site.

I
am known as Dr. Dave. I am a problem thinker.

As
you can see, outwardly I was a typical research physicist.
For thirty years I existed on hand outs as a
postdoctoral fellow, a research associate, and a temporary
contract worker. I ended in the gutter, sponging on the taxpayer,
employed as a Canadian federal bureaucrat running obsolete
equipment and shuffling old data. Inwardly, all my existence, I have
nursed an ugly secret: I am addicted to original, creative
science.While managers were
preoccupied writing memos, holding meetings, drafting proposals and
fighting over turf, I furtively published reviewed papers in
the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, The
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Journal of
the Practical Applications of Space, and the Journal of the Canadian
Aeronautical and Space Institute. As a result of my efforts I was
invited to be a charter member of the Exo-biology, (now
astro-biology) commission of the International Astronomical Union
while I was not profitably employed. As my addiction to
creative thinking became worse I wrote commentaries for the
prestigious Interdisciplinary Sciences Review. I now confess my
pathological creativity finally led me to write the 'Ulysses
Speaks' satirical column for the back page of 'Canadian
Research' Magazine. The government disposed of me, but still I
kept thinking. I was an editor of the 5th Cosmic Study of the
International Academy of Astronautics, and in 1999 presented its
conclusions to the congress of the International Astronautical
Federation in Amsterdam. Indeed, for over twenty five years I have
enjoyed a dubious after office hours life as a panellist
and lecturer at science fiction conventions.

The fen in
my audience have often urged me to come into the open about my
thinking. But I feared being recognized, severely managed
and defunctioned. I was eventually downsized to the
government's discards file more than ten years ago, and now that high
speed Internet has come to the Village I can make my thoughts public.
You read them at your own risk. Eventually I hope to convert their
illustrations on 35 mm slides to a file format. Bracketing
the presentations will be quotations from on high and graffiti
from the lower depths. In this world there are managers and
there are peons. Managers p** on peons, who, as always, will
remain faceless, disposable and anonymous.

The old standby. I
first presented this in 1985 and after twenty yearsand two
world science fiction conventions it is still current and in
demand. Ten years after it was presented,
the Lockheed Skunk Works admitted
that the ideal stealth form was a thin convex 'UFO'
shape. Ten years after that the British
National Space Centre announced that women are better
suited to interplanetary space flight. than men.

In 1992 as
I shuffled paper for my director's presentation to the
taskforce on Canada's Space Policy, I submited my own
presentation asan independent citizen. Silly me,
writing about vision to managers,
politicians and executives.

After the drinks
comes food! The potential for space based, high cuisine
has been neglected. I was living in Calgary
when I wrote this essay, however I believe
undercurrents carried a copy to Ottawa where it
graced the notice board of the NRC (No Research
Council) during the late '80's.

Prospecting for the
ore bodies on the last frontier. I was invited to present
this at the I.S.P.G. (Institute for Sedimentary and Petroleum
Geology) in Calgary in 1988 and no one turned up. I had, however,
a large and enthusiastic audience at the International
Space Development Conference in Toronto in 1992. In 2005 'Sky
News' announced the Baker-Nunn camera at the Rothney Observatory
had been refurbished and was now searching for asteroids. A fine
example of well managed Canadian Research...better 15
years late than never.

The discovery of
Nanotubes has made the building of a space elevator to take
cargoes up to the Clarke orbit a physical possibility.
But would a ski lift to the stars be a practical, profitable and
wise investment?